Listen, one of my best clients is a large law firm and I work closely with their management team. They are for the most part unfailingly polite, good lawyers, and some of the smartest people I know. But I recognize that they are the cream of the crop. I recognize this because several past law firm clients have been mercenary, dishonest, late paying bastards.
I don’t have a problem with the practice of law not being a dead-end job. I have a problem with law firms requiring that their own employees act as if they are in invested in the firm, but then denying them any chance at that investment.
And it appears that people are deciding that they get paid too much (hence, the need to keep client bills down to keep the business). Interesting that in this case, the lawyers response to this is to put pressure on their non-legal staff to do more work in less time, not correct their own behaviors or adjust their pay to reflect the new reality.
Believe me, I’m not a knee-jerk lawyer hater, but I also recognize that not all lawyers walk on water. Finally, I recognize that the practice of law is a profession like many others. It is not some high preisthood requiring of special gifts. The fact that lawyers write laws and rules to require the rest of us to treat them as if they and only they hold the keys to civilized society is my problem.
Sorry, I should have said “third class”. The Associates are basically your second class citizens until they make Partner and all the stink is removed from their poo.
I have to agree with Zakalwe, except if anything, we are going to see MORE lawyers, not less. I spent the better part of the week at a conference on electronic discovery for financial services companies. I also happened to go to an MBA alumni event. The entire time I’m thinking "here are hundreds of people getting paid a lot of money and almost none of them work for a company that actually makes or builds anything. They are literally the Randian definition of “Looters and Moochers”. Creating a dizzying array of regulations so the poor masses don’t get swindled by the big bad businesses. And of course you need lawyers to write those regulations and compliance experts to make sure they are being followed. Not to mention the armies of software venders, consultants, stratagists and more lawyers all advising each other.
So apparently our country no longer makes anything besides pompous douchebags.
I feel your pain. I’m at work right now. I’m working on a project that isn’t billable. It’s marketing work, and it involves creating a bunch of materials and organizing a lot of information to assist a partner here in pitching work to a bunch of prospective clients. I can’t really go into detail here, obviously (hey, for all I know, we work at the same firm).
But it’s non-billable. And we’ve had layoffs, of support staff and lawyers, and the firm doesn’t want to spend any money. And yet this work has to be done, so there’s enormous pressure to get it done. So here I am, working for free. It’s wrong, it’s probably illegal (except that our employment lawyers have figured out how to weasel around the law and make it appear as if nobody was ever pressured to put in uncompensated OT).
And if the pitches are successful, the partner behind all this will make a shitload of money, and a couple of associates will have tons of work and be in a position to prove they’re “partnership material.” Me, I won’t see any benefit from having done quite a bit of work for which I’m not getting paid. Not even a thank you, since none of the lawyers can actually acknowledge that I’ve done this for for free.
If you are so upset about having to work “for free” and not getting any acknowledgement, why not get a different job? My guess is that then you wouldn’t have anything to bitch about.
My firm has a policy that forbids an attorney from instructing anyone not to bill time accurately. And you’re right, the proper thing for the partner to do is to write off the time. If you do end up having the “unpleasant conversation” maybe there’s another partner you can go to? Because what this partner is doing is wrong on so many levels.
You’re such an idiot. Do you even know how to read? Because in the last few weeks there have been a number of news stories about layoffs in the legal industries. L&W, for example, reportedly just laid off 190 associates and 250 staff. Given the poor market right now, why is your first reaction that Saintly Loser should run away from adversity like a little child?
(And Saintly Loser, I feel your pain. I billed about 50 hours this month to marketing stuff, and next month I guaran-damn-tee you that the conversation I’ll have with the head of my group isn’t “thanks for pitching in,” it’ll be “why did you waste those 50 hours on something non-billable?”)
And if you were the professional you claim to be, you’d say “OK boss, so what do you want me to do when a partner asks me to work on marketing stuff?” Then do that. But then you’d have nothing to bitch about.
Can’t the OP say something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, but as you know, my time has to be billable. Is it okay if I bill it to your charge code instead?”
Okay, I work in an industry where we have to bill clients according to their charge codes also, and the very FIRST thing we do when someone asks us to do a task is “is it billable?” and then “gimme the charge code”. Most of our PMs are pretty good, but there are a few who will try to sneak in time on overhead that rightfully belongs on a client’s bill. We’ve learned to not lift a finger on their projects without the charge code in our hot little hands, or sent to us in an email or whatever. If you don’t, and try to bill for time on their projects, they’ll come back with “oh, that wasn’t billable, we were just talking”. Um dude, we were planning logistics, that’s actual project work. We learned very quickly what PMs we didn’t do a thing for until they’d gotten us a code and approved its use.
Our timesheets state right at the bottom all that rot about how it’s ILLEGAL to not charge to the correct charge code and/or the correct number of hours. That it is ILLEGAL to put different hours than those actually worked. Is this not true of the legal profession as well?
It can be kind of intimidating to insist upon legal integrity regarding charging time from those in authority, but with a bit of practice, you can calmly state (while obviously showing that you’re not moving until you get it), “and do you have the charge code for that”? “Okay, do you have a time limit/stopping point I need to stick with”? And then, if you reach the halfway point. “Hi Joe? I have 6 more hours on the XYZ project, but the A and B sections are done, do you want to add hours, or would you rather just have me focus on section C for the 2 hours I have remaining for your project? Joe Blow has me slated for his BlahBlah project next so if you are finished with me after the 2 hours, I’ll be moving on to his project work”…etc
You’re right. I’m speaking the language of taking responsibility for yourself and clearly communicating with others about their expectations for your job. You are speaking the language of just going with the flow and getting upset when something happens that could have been solved by up-front communication.
I may be discounting possibilities, but you are discounting facts–such as that Campion doesn’t know what management wants and is unwilling to ask (preferring instead to live in a real-life Seinfeld episode full of problems that could be solved with a frank conversation).
No, and I’d be curious to see what statute makes it illegal in your industry.
In certain legal fields where the defendant pays their own attorney and the plaintiff’s it’s illegal for the plaintiff’s attorney to misrepresent their billed time, because usually a judge has to make a determination regarding the attorney’s fee owing to the plaintiff’s attorney.
You are apparently assuming that Campion has never had an analogous conversation regarding a different project, and never seen what happened when someone else in the office had an analogous conversation.
How about fraud? Are you telling me that in your industry it’s perfectly okay to bill clients for time not actually worked on their stuff? Or that it’s okay for employees to file for payment for time not worked?
I don’t understand your attitude. Your firm is struggling financially and you are bitching and penny pinching because you have to work a little extra overtime to help them land new business? Why? Because you think the partner gets paid too well?
Look, no one held a gun to your head and made you work for a law firm. Go find a job in Kinkos or some admin position in a big company if you want regular hours. If you work in a law firm as a paralegal or lit support person, you are going to work for ambitious, high strung attornies who only care about winning their cases and making partner. You have to expect that they are not going to care about you getting home to see your kids.
I mean do you really imagine your attornies telling the SEC or some judge “uh…sorry, we can’t produce that. Our support staff only works until 5:00pm”?
I think you may be discounting the possibility that management is responsible for making sure the business stays profitable so it can stay in business. It’s like those dumb automaker unions arguing with management while their companies are going out of business. Who cares what you negotiate with a company that won’t exist next year?
Are you admitting to possibility that the right thing to do is to pay your employee for the time he spends doing the work you give him?
“The laborer is worthy of his hire.” Not sure who said that, but it seems rather self-evident, and I’m somewhat appalled that someone as highly educated as a lawyer would need to have it pointed out to him by a man without so much as a college degree.
I didn’t read it that way. I thought that they’re talking about having to work OT, but they can’t bill for it, so they’re supposed to leave it off their timesheets. Federal Wage & Hour has some very not nice to say to companies that allow/encourage that kind of behavior.
However, if you’re just talking about not billing time to a client, then I agree that illegal is not the appropriate term.